by James Millar
WILLIAM G. WAGNER
MARTOV, YULI OSIPOVICH
(1873-1923), founder of Russian social democracy, later leader of the Menshevik party.
Born Yuli Osipovich Tsederbaum to a middle- class Jewish family in Constantinople, Yuli Martov established the St. Petersburg Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class with Lenin in 1895. The following year, Martov was sentenced to three years’ exile in Siberia. After serving his term, he joined Lenin in Switzerland where they launched the revolutionary Marxist newspaper Iskra. Martov broke with Lenin at the Russian Social Democratic Party’s Second Congress in Brussels in 1903, when he opposed his erstwhile comrade’s bid for leadership of the party and his demand for a narrow,
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MARXISM
highly centralized party of professional revolutionaries, instead calling for a broad-based party with mass membership. Lenin labelled Martov’s supporters the Menshevik (minority) faction; his own followers constituted the Bolsheviks (majority). While Lenin proclaimed that socialists should respond to a successful bourgeois revolution by taking immediate steps to prepare for their own takeover of government, Martov advocated abstention from power and a strategy of militant opposition rooted in democratic institutions such as workers’ soviets, trades unions, cooperatives, or town and village councils. These “organs of revolutionary self-government” would impel the bourgeois government to implement political and economic reform, which would, in time, bring about conditions favorable to a successful, peaceful, proletarian revolution. After the outbreak of war, Martov was a founder of the Zimmerwald movement, which stood for internationalism and “peace without victory” against both the “defensism” of some socialist leaders and Lenin’s ambition to transform the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war. Martov returned to Russia in mid-May 1917. His internationalist position and advocacy of militant opposition to bourgeois government brought him into open conflict with Menshevik leaders such as Irakly Tsereteli, who proclaimed “revolutionary defensism” and had days earlier entered a coalition with the Provisional Government’s liberal ministers. The collapse of the first coalition ministry in early July prompted Martov to declare that the time was now ripe for the formation of a democratic government of socialist forces. On repeated occasions in subsequent months, however, his new strategy was rejected both by coalitionist Mensheviks and by Bolsheviks intent on seizing power for themselves. After November 1917, Martov remained a courageous and outspoken opponent of Lenin’s political leadership and increasingly despotic methods of rule. Although the Bolsheviks repudiated his efforts to secure a role for the socialist opposition, Martov supported the new regime in its struggle against counterrevolution and foreign intervention. Regardless of this, by 1920 the Menshevik party in Russia had been destroyed, and most of its leaders and activists were in prison or exile. In this year Martov finally left Russia and settled in Berlin. There he founded and edited the Sotsialistichesky vestnik (Socialist Courier), a widely influential social democratic newspaper committed to mobilizing international radical opinion against the Bolshevik dictatorship and halting the spread of Comintern influence among democratic left-wing movements. Martov died on April 4, 1923. As his biographer has written, Martov’s honesty, strong sense of principle, and deeply humane nature precluded his success as a revolutionary politician, but in opposition and exile he brilliantly personified social democracy’s moral conscience (Getzler, 1994). See also: BOLSHEVISM; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; MENSHE-VIKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Getzler, Israel. (1994). “Iulii Martov, the Leader Who Lost His Party in 1917.” Slavonic and East European Review 72:424-439. Getzler, Israel. (1967). Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
NICK BARON
MARXISM
Karl Marx was born in Trier in Prussia in 1818, and he died in London in 1883. The general approach embodied in Marx’s theoretical writings and his analysis of capitalism may be termed historical materialism, or the materialist interpretation of history. Indeed, that approach may well be considered the cornerstone of Marxism. Marx argued that the superstructure of society was conditioned decisively by the productive base of society, so that the superstructure must always be understood in relation to the base. The base consists of the mode of production, in which forces of production (land, raw materials, capital, and labor) are combined, and in which relations among people arise, determined by their relationship to the means of production. As Marx said in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859, “The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general.” Marx considered the superstructure to include the family, the culture, the state, philosophy, and religion.
In Marx’s view, all the elements of the superstructure served the interests of the dominant class in a society. He saw the class division in any society beyond a primitive level of development as reMASLENITSA flecting the distinction between those who owned and controlled the means of production, on the one hand, and those who lacked a share of ownership and therefore were compelled to labor in the process of production, on the other hand. That fundamental division had been reproduced in various forms in the stages of European history, from ancient slaveholding society through feudalism to capitalism. In capitalist society (which was the main subject of Marx’s writings) the crucial axis of social conflict was between the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie, and the industrial working class, or proletariat. Marx attempted to demonstrate that the antagonism between those classes would continue to intensify, until the workers’ revolution would destroy capitalism and usher in communism.
The dialectical mode of interpretation found a new application in Marx’s analysis of the development of the capitalist economy. Marx claimed to have detected three “laws of capitalist development”: the constant accumulation of capital, the increasing concentration of capital, and the increasing misery of the proletariat. Those laws spelled the progressive polarization of society between an expanding number of impoverished and exploited workers and a decreasing number of wealthy capitalists. As the system became more technologically advanced and productive, the mass of the people in the system would become more destitute and more desperate. The common experience of exploitation would forge powerful solidarity within the ranks of the proletariat, who at the height of the final crisis of capitalism would rise in revolution and expropriate the property of the capitalist class.
Marx wrote far more about capitalism than about the society that would follow the proletarian revolution. He made it clear, however, that he expected the revolution of the working class to socialize the means of production and create a dictatorship of the proletariat. That dictatorship would be the workers’ state, but its existence would be temporary, as society moved from the first, transitional phase of communism to the higher phase, in which the full potential of communism would be realized, so that class differences would have disappeared, the state would have died off, and each person would contribute to society according to personal ability and receive material benefits according to need.
Before the end of the nineteenth century Marx’s theory and his revolutionary vision had been embraced by the leaders of socialist parties in a number of European countries. The spread of Marxism’s influence was soon followed by schisms in international socialism, however. By the end of World War I, a fundamental split had taken place between Lenin’s version of Marxism in the Soviet Union (which after Lenin’s death became known as Marxism-Leninism) and the democratically oriented socialism of major Western socialist parties, which stemmed from the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein. The legacy of that division was a rivalry between socialist and communist parties, which was to hamper the left-wi
ng forces in continental European countries for several decades. Ironically, though Marx’s theory suggested that proletarian revolutions would triumph in the most economically advanced capitalist nations, during the twentieth century successful revolutions under the banner of Marxism and in the name of the proletariat were carried off only in countries with mainly agrarian economies, in which industrialization was in its early stages and the working class was relatively small. See also: COMMUNISM; DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM; DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT; SOCIALISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Avineri, Shlomo. (1971). Karl Marx: Social and Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Evans, Alfred B., Jr. (1993). Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology. Westport, CT: Praeger. Kolakowski, Leszek. (1978). Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution. 3 vols. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. Leonhard, Wolfgang. (1974). Three Faces of Marxism: The Political Concepts of Soviet Ideology, Maoism, and Humanist Marxism, tr. Ewald Osers. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
ALFRED B. EVANS JR.
MASLENITSA
Derived from the word maslo, or “butter/oil,” Maslenitsa was a pagan mythological being personifying death, gloom, and winter as well as a week-long festival that divided winter and spring seasons. The pagan festival was synchronized with Lent and is equivalent to the western European Shrovetide and carnival. Maslenitsa survived
MATERIAL BALANCES
among all Eastern Slavs, particularly Russians, who began celebrating it on a Sunday a week prior to Lent, the final day when meat was permitted in the diet according to Church practices. After the last meat meal, for the remainder of the week people consumed milk products and fish, but most commonly butter-covered bliny, or pancakes. The festival ended on the following Sunday, the day before Lent, and is known as the day of dispatching Maslenitsa or Proshcheny Voskresenie (“Forgiveness Sunday”), as people who had wronged others (alive or deceased) begged for absolution. This day was rounded off with the ritual destruction and burial of Maslenitsa, commonly represented in the form of a female effigy made of straw and dressed in woman’s garb, in a bonfire, drowning in a river, or tearing apart. A wooden wheel, symbolizing the sun-disk, was also often burned alongside the effigy, leading to the idea that this festival was celebrated in connection with the spring equinox (usually on March 22) in pre-Christian times.
The annihilation of Maslenitsa symbolized the passing of the winter, spring renewal, and preparation for the new agrarian cycle as well as human and animal procreation. Family-marriage relations were tested among newlywed couples, who were publicly discussed, required to openly show affection, and put through trials testing their love and fidelity. Eligible singles who failed to wed the previous year were publicly ridiculed and punished. Virility of humans, plants, and animals were conjured up by performing magical rites, fist-fighting, dancing, loud singing, and sled-riding contests downhill or on troikas. The continued celebration of this pagan festival cloaked in a Christian holiday into modern times among the Eastern Slavs is a good example of dual faith (dvoyeverie) or syncretism. See also: FOLKLORE; RUSSIANS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ivantis, Linda J. (1989). Russian Folk Belief. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
ROMAN K. KOVALEV
MATERIAL BALANCES
Material balance planning substituted for the market as the mechanism for allocating goods in the Soviet economy. Gosplan, the State Planning Committee, was responsible each year for equating supply and demand for the thousands of raw materials and manufactured goods that were used domestically in production processes, allocated to satisfy consumer needs, or earmarked for export. The three-stage process of constructing the annual plan involved identifying the sources and uses for high-priority (funded commodities), medium-priority (planned commodities), and low-priority (decentrally planned) goods, and then establishing a balance between sources and uses. In the first stage, planners sent “control figures” down through the economic hierarchy to the enterprise. Control figures reflected the priorities of top political officials, specified initially as aggregate output targets or percentage growth rates for strategic sectors of the economy, and then disaggregated and matched with projected input requirements by Gosplan. In the second stage, Soviet enterprises provided a detailed listing of the input requirements necessary to fulfill their output targets. In the third stage, planners constructed a material balance that ensured an equilibrium between the planned output target and the material input requirements for all goods involved in the planning process.
In a market economy, prices adjust to eliminate surpluses or shortages; in the Soviet economy, planners adjusted physical quantities to equate supply and demand for each product. A material balance was achieved when the sources of supply (current production, Qt, inventories, Qt-1, and imports Mt) equaled the sources of demand (interindustry demand, IDt, household demand, FDt, and exports, Xt). That is, a material balance existed on paper when, for each of the planned goods: Qt + Qt-1 + Mt = IDt + FDt + Xt.
The mechanics of establishing a material balance in practice was impeded by several planning policies. First, planners set annual output targets high relative to the productive capacity of the firm. If tire manufacturers failed to meet monthly or quarterly production quotas, for example, this adversely affected downstream firms (producers of cars, trucks, tractors, or bicycles) that relied on tires to fulfill their output targets, and reduced the availability of tires to consumers for replacement purposes. Second, planners constructed a bonus system that allowed additional payments as high as 60 percent of the monthly wage if output targets were fulfilled. Knowing that output targets would be high, managers over-ordered requisite inputs and under-reported their productive capacity during the second stage of the plan-formulation process. Third,
MATERIAL PRODUCT SYSTEM
when shortages arose, planners refrained from adjusting centrally determined prices of these “deficit” commodities (defitsitny). Instead, they used a priority system to restrict the availability of deficit goods to low-priority sectors, typically those sectors most closely involving goods demanded by consumers. See also: FULL ECONOMIC ACCOUNTING; GOSPLAN; TECH-PROMFINPLAN
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bergson, Abram. (1964). The Economics of Soviet Planning. New Haven: Yale University Press. Montias, John M. (1959). “Planning with Material Balances in Soviet-Type Economies.” American Economic Review 49: 963-985.
SUSAN J. LINZ
MATERIAL PRODUCT SYSTEM
For decades the Material Product System (MPS) was used in countries with centrally planned economies as a tool for analyzing economic processes at the macro level and policy making. Essentially, MPS performs the same functions as the System of National Accounts (SNA), but there are important difference between the two.
MPS divides the economy into two parts: material production, where national income (NMP) is created (industry, agriculture, construction, freight transportation, etc.), and the nonmaterial part of the economy. The concept of economic sectors and, hence, sectoral groupings, was entirely omitted in the MPS system. Such an approach toward estimation of macroeconomic indicators met the needs of planners and was instrumental in the process of centralized planning, centralized allocation of material resources, and tracking of plan fulfillment.
Essentially, MPS is a system of tables, of which the most important are the balance of production, consumption, and investment of the social product and national income; the balance of national wealth, the balance of fixed assets, and the balance of labor resources. A significant part of the MPS system was its series of input-output tables, which were compiled in the USSR beginning in 1959. In addition to the main MPS tables, there was a series of supplementary tables that gave a more detailed picture of certain aspects of the economic process. The MPS as a system of aggregate macro indicators was an important tool for general assessment of the economic situation under the central planning system. Its drawback, however, was that it reflected economic processes in a somewhat incon
sistent and partial manner. A large part of the economy, the so-called nonproductive sphere, was neglected in the balance of the national economy. In Soviet statistics, a methodologically sound and systematically integrated system of indicators was available only for the material production and distribution of material product. This significantly reduced the role of macro estimates as an instrument for analysis of economic developments.
Estimates of economic growth and international comparisons were also hindered by the lack of coordination between MPS indicators and financial flows. In the balance of state financial resources and the state budget, the financial resources of enterprises and organizations of both productive and nonproductive spheres are represented as a single entry. The balance of money income and expenditure of households shows the total money income of the population earned from both “productive” and “nonproductive” activities. The method used to derive this indicator is such that it is impossible to separate these two sources of revenue.
